Judge Smails
19 hours ago
Read a book sometime ago about this subject. It would appear to me that adequate intelligence was not being passed from DC to Pearl regarding Japan. Still, that radar system that was operational did what it was suppose to do and painted the massive amount of aircraft in formation (over 300), far larger than those three unarmed B-17s. The soldier watching it phoned the duty officer and was told "not to worry about it." Outrageous. We knew an attack was coming, but not where. Could have been the Philippines, Singapore or Thailand. No one thought Pearl was in jeopardy for some reason. Astonishing.

Air patrols should have been up looking west through north. It would have been easy to spot over 300 aircraft in formation as they closed on the north coast of Hawaii. Two days before, Japan told all its embassies to destroy their sensitive material. DC knew this. Tragic, horrible day.

anon-y2mh Southside
16 hours ago edited
Probably the biggest one I can think of off the top of my head was "At Dawn We Slept" by Gordon Prange.

However, something to think about - the USN actually wargamed an attack where the US had 24 hours warning. Pacific Fleet was able to sortie, and they met Kido Butai some four or five hundred miles north of Pearl Harbor.

Where they proceeded to get their asses kicked (it hurts to say, but I say that as a veteran myself - call Pearl Harbor what it was) as badly as they did in real life. There were only 2 carriers available in PacFlt at that point. One was off delivering aircraft to someplace (Midway, I believe). Don't remember where the other was, but they were not in any shape at all to contribute to a battle with 6 Japanese carriers.

The gotcha was where they were. In the real world, Pearl Harbor was only something like 60 - 100 ft. deep. The Navy was able to salvage and patch many of the ships initially sunk or mangled. Had they met the Japanese navy 500 miles northwest of Pearl, they would have been in multi-thousand foot deep water. Any ship lost there would have been lost permanently.

The point is that Pearl Harbor has on several occasions been called the most "successful defeat" in USN history. Had they been warned, the death toll would have been higher and the permanent destruction of PacFlt (minus the two carriers) would most likely been almost total.